Emily Talmadge salutes Lisa Haver, who wrote an article in a Philadelphia newspaper asking why the billionaires who play with public schools are never held accountable. She recommends that all of us should “be like Lisa,” speak up, stand up, demand that billionaires keep their hands off our public schools with their half-baked ideas.
Emily has the advantage of having gone to school with Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe she can answer a question that has bothered me whenever I see a picture of him. Does he own any shirts that are not solid color T-shirts? Is he pretending to be Steve Jobs? Does he own a shirt with buttons? Has he ever worn a tie? None of these are necessary, but I imagine him at a black-tie dinner wearing a T-shirt. Just because he is richer than everyone else.
Anyway…
Emily writes:
Sixteen years ago, Mark Zuckerberg and I sat across from each other in Latin class at Phillips Exeter Academy.
A few years after Exeter, I began teaching public school.
Mark, meanwhile, invented Facebook and became a billionaire.
Now, the one who never worked a day in his life in a public school (Mark) is crusading nationwide to “remake” public schools.
Without bothering to hear from those who actually work in those schools (I wrote Mark an open letter a couple of years ago that was picked up by a number of popular media outlets, but never heard back), Mark and his wife are striving to build a public school system that in no way resembles the intimate, discussion-based, mostly tech-free education (with no more than twelve students per class) that we got at Exeter.
Chan and Zuckerberg – along with a long list of other billionaires like Reed Hastings, Laurene Powell Jobs, Eli Broad, and the Waltons – are currently pushing an education agenda that puts an electronic device at the hands of each student, tracking their every move with “personalized learning plans” that will warn you in big red letters if at any time you fall off-track and aren’t meeting the standards as you should be.
There’s a giant profit motive behind this frighteningly technocratic vision, and anyone who cares about public schools should be fighting tooth and nail against it.
Unfortunately, based on the speed at which schools are adopting Mark’s “Summit Personalized Learning” program and the amount of money his LLC is throwing at public policy initiatives, Mark and his billionaire buddies are currently winning this war.
Most of the billionaires who want to reshape education want to make it completely reliant on technology, even though they don’t send their own children to schools like that. They prefer the kind where an experienced teacher sits at a seminar table with a dozen students and discusses what they are learning. The Waltons are different; they are not in the tech sector. They want to bust unions, and they have found that funding charters is the best way to achieve that goal.
Be like Lisa, she writes. Blow the whistle. Call foul. Speak up. Now.
Thanks again, Diane. It is important that we get our message out.
Thank you so much for your article, Lisa!
Ditto.
What is worse is that Chan-Zuckerberg is a pediatrician and should know better. The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a warning about too much screen time for children. Nobody knows to long term impact of sitting in front of screens, and it may take many years to understand the full impact. However, I suspect the results will not be positive. Doctors have already noted a big spike in near sightedness in children, and they suspect it may be due to increased computer usage. https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/pages/american-academy-of-pediatrics-announces-new-recommendations-for-childrens-media-use.aspx
Let’s be clear about what these billionaires’ motivation is: PROFIT. The LLC is seed money to get their project off the ground. It has nothing to do with philanthropy. It is all about profiting from other people’s children.
Having graduated from medical school and received a license, has Chan ever actually practiced medicine?
As far as I can tell, she’s there to assist in the production of making Zuckerberg appear human.
She’s also there to assist in the production of making “mini me’s” for “the Zuck”. Wonder if the children are cloned? I believe she was a pediatrician for 2 years.
In one interview, she credited her academic success and acceptance to Harvard to her public school teachers, who encouraged her.
I guess she forgot them, as Viola Davis forgot hers.
I keep tweeting at Viola Davis @violadavis, reminding her of her debt to Central Falls High School in RI, and her current love affair with the corporate reformers, but she never responds.
I just want to know if his wardrobe includes anything other than solid color t-shirts.
Something vain about the statement: I’m so rich, I can dress as I want anytime
I think he wore a tie speaking at Harvard’s graduation in May, Diane.
Oh, good, he owns a tie. Did he wear it over his T-shirt? (joke)
If I am correct, I believe I saw him wear one of those t shirts with the tie printed on it?
I googled Mark Zuckerberg and looked at “images.”
He does have a dress shirt. He has a blue tie, a purple tie, and a black tie. Mostly, he wears the blue tie.
But most of the time, he wears a T-shirt. The same one.
You know what I say about ties? Whoever invented the first one should have been strung up on a lamppost by it so that it would have passed into oblivion with its inventor.
Ties have something in common with cigars. They are both phallic symbols.
YES. “Let’s be clear about what these billionaires’ motivation is: PROFIT.” We must very aggressively do our best to stop ourselves, our peers, our friends and our news outlets from labeling the tech billionaire push to control schools as philanthropy.
You know, we’re told over and over how smart these people are but there is no pushback at all to the huge marketing campaign selling ed tech.
What happened to all that blather about “rigor” and “data”? Why are they ALL pushing this when they have no idea if it has any value?
The worst actors aren’t the tech billionaires – the worst actors are the people in government. Don’t tell public schools to invest billions of dollars or thousands of hours in an experiment. That’s reckless and stupid.
The US Department of Education is not supposed to be pushing product. It is NOT their job.
They’re absolutely shameless about it- Arne Duncan talks about “the 9 billion dollar ed tech industry”. Is he a volunteer sales representative? Why are they all shilling for these products?
Zuckerberg and his wife, Chan, are maggots. They only care about power and $$$$$. What they did to the people on Kaua’i makes me ill. Sure Zuckerberg took back his lawsuit, but he is JUST REGROUPING until the toxicity goes down. I hope the people of Kaua’i run him off the island like the peeople of Moloka’i did to McAfee.
Zuckerberg didn’t invent Facebook. He stole the idea from two brothers, the Winklevoss Twins, who hired him to help them create something similar. What Zuckerberg did was take that idea and adapted it into what Facebook became from the original concept.
Zuckerberg moved faster than the others and beat them out.
Diane, check out Emily Talmadge’s newest post on Save Maine Schools.
She’s basically insulting you for being a judge for MacArthur Foundation’s 100 and Change grant competition.
Zorba,
I left this response on Emily Talmage’s blog:
Emily,
I was invited some months ago by the MacArthur Foundation to be one of hundreds of reviewers for their $100 million contest for a single great idea. The foundation received 2,000 applications. I reviewed 10. A few were not very good ideas. Some were very impressive. They were submitted by well qualified teams of experts with sound ideas about alleviating hunger, poverty, disease, and other major problems, in this country and in impoverished countries. None of the ideas I approved were profit-making ventures.
I was not paid for doing this. It was an interesting assignment, to which I devoted a few hours one evening.
I was not asked to review the MacArthur Foundation. In my extensive readings of nefarious organizations, I don’t recall coming across the MacArthur Foundation as a funder. Had I been asked to do a similar assignment for the Walton Foundation or the Broad Foundation or the CZI or the Gates Foundation, I would have said no.
I know the MacArthur Foundation only for its “genius” awards, which I have never seen as controversial.
I make no apologies for judging 10 of 2,000 proposals.
You can reach any conclusion you wish.
I am not your enemy. You have read my blog. You know where I stand on testing, privatization, and CBE. Frankly, I was surprised that you would write as if I were not on your side. News flash: I am your ally.
Diane Ravitch
Good response and now we wait for hers.
Public schools can’t turn their backs on technology. The algorithms that are widely used to send us sidebar ads of items we just Googled, that Amazon uses to suggest movies we’d like to see or books we’d like to read, or the NYTimes uses to suggest articles that I’d like to read COULD have applications in school. And the wealth of information we have collected on children and “archived” on paper in filing cabinets COULD be put to use and more readily accessed through data warehousing.
My 2 cents on this is that tech moguls who have already made more than they can possibly spend in their lifetimes should allow public schools to use products that embed these algorithms for free instead of packaging them into “products” that they turn around to sell to schools at a profit. As it stands now, tech companies gouge taxpayers at both ends of the equation: they seek tax breaks from communities to locate their businesses (i.e. FoxConn and Amazon), they shelter their profits off-shore (i.e. Apple), and then charge taxpayers for products they dream up and promote through foundations that are ostensibly donating millions to “help” public education.
The system as it exists now provides inordinate rewards to those creating “products” like software, social media sites, and virtual shopping malls. In addition to railing against the billionaires who use their “rewards” to keep the cycle above intact, we need to figure out a way to stem the flow of cash upward. Maybe an ALEC-like organization for public education could offer some sample bills for progressive legislators?